How many of these Irish words do you know?

ByEoin Bitesize, posted onApril 4, 2012

If you’re completely new to learning to speak the Irish language, it might seem that you’ll need to know thousands of words before making sense of the language. This depends on where you are on your language journey.

The number of Irish (Gaelic) words you actually need to learn is actually quite small. I’m not saying that learning to speak Irish is as simple as memorizing a list of Irish words, far from it! But if you can become familiar with a small list of core words, you’ll be laying a foundation for your language learning.

Here are the most common Irish words in Bitesize Irish Gaelic audio recordings

The most common words recorded with pronunciation for Bitesize Irish Gaelic online lessons.

How many of those words do you recognize? Please leave a reply below. Were you surprised by the words that showed up here from our on-line Irish lessons?

Even if you’re just starting to learn Irish words and their pronunciation, it’s useful to see what the most common words are.

Here are certainly some important ones: Tá, go, maith, mé, sé, Ní, nach, tú le, bhfuil, liom, anseo… These words usually don’t make sense on their own. They belong to phrases and expressions. If you have taken our free Irish for Beginners mini-series, you’ll have encountered many of these words in your first conversation lessons.

Finally, if the pronunciation of these written Irish words seems alien to you, it’s that you don’t have the pronunciation rules yet. If you know the rules, you can even figure out the pronunciation of Irish words you have never before seen. See our Pronunciation Cheat Sheets to help you on this (but make sure you’re serious about learning before investing in them).

What new Irish word have you learned this week? Leave a reply below with that, or any questions you have.

What is Bitesize Irish Gaelic? We believe that the most personal way you can express your Irish heritage is to speak some of our language. And you can do that thousands of miles outside of Ireland. Our online bitesize lessons let you learn to speak Irish Gaelic, all at your own pace. Find out more.

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